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Mission Statement

The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

A Publication of:

Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of
Religion. New York: Harper and Row,
1959.

Neil Postman. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to
Technology. New York: Knopf,
1992.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their markMade everything from toy guns that sparkTo flesh-colored Christs that glow in the darkIt’s easy to see without looking too farThat not muchIs really sacred.

Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”

Some things that were formerly sacred nowadays seem to have lost their luster. This is a common
sentiment, as illustrated over forty years ago in one of
Bob Dylan’s most haunting lyrics. Cheap and garish goods, such as glow-in-the-dark statues of Jesus, evidently do contribute to our loss of the sacred.
But behind Dylan’s critique, and this
essay, is the firm conviction that human beings desperately
need the sacred as a centerpiece of our collective imaginations and
vocabularies. And if indeed we’ve badly mangled
our ability to imagine the sacred, we better
do what we can to recover it. “He not busy
being born is busy dying,” sang Dylan.

In his masterful
study of The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea
Eliade describes the sacred as a primal, and a
primary, human need. We can perceive the sacred as “the manifestation of something of a wholly
different order, a reality that does not belong to our world” (11). Even fifty years ago, when he published his book, Eliade was reporting that western cultures were
losing their sense of the sacred, and he was
greatly distressed about the barbaric results that might ensue from this loss.
How quickly the acceleration has proceeded since then.

Today, early in the twenty-first century, it might seem commonplace that the sacred has
been moved to the margins of much of our so-called “secular” society.
But even this bit of “commonplace” is a recent development. Most peoples have
believed in the sacred; says Eliade: “the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the
human spirit....desacralization pervades the entire experience of
the nonreligious societies and...in consequence,
[one] finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions
of religious man in the archaic societies” (13).

If Eliade is correct, and if
humans by their very nature must seek and commune with the sacred, perhaps it explains the persistence with which
many Americans continue to self-identify as being “spiritual.” While young
people and college students by the droves are distancing themselves from the
organized churches, they still have a hard time denying that
built-in need for the sacred. As a frequent teacher of “spiritual” literature
courses, one of the major revelations of my courses often
turns out to be the way that the quintessential ideas of the sacred in American
culture, such as God and the universal Body of Christ, are being systematically eviscerated of whatever
sacred power once resided in them. These formerly sacred symbols are being
drained of whatever power they once might have held. Consider the change in
public perceptions of the church and Christianity over the past generation.
Numerous well-publicized scandals have rocked the hierarchy of both the
Catholic and the evangelical churches—and often these scandals revolve around
sex with children. Furthermore, the loud
and insistent public spokespersons of the Religious Right have bullied their
way into partisan politics in a manner that appears to many to be sufficiently
unchristian, so much so that it has had an ironically
off-putting effect on many of the unchurched today.

All of this bad press helps explain why in today’s America, “spiritual” has become
such a favored term. Frequently one hears from intelligent adults the
distinction that they are “spiritual but not religious.” That pithy phrase has become so conspicuous that
Robert C. Fuller used it as the title of his influential volume discussing the
phenomenon, (2001). According to Fuller, until very recently religious and spiritual were
basically synonymous. But now as many as 20 percent of Americans describe
themselves without irony as “spiritual, but not religious.”
The abandonment of the term religious for self-identification apparently refers
to the speaker’s skepticism toward “organized religion,”
even though that speaker desires to be understood as a person of metaphysical
curiosity and even perhaps commitment. American perceptions of religious
institutions have fallen on such hard symbolic times that a fairly substantial
number of Americans are choosing not to self-identify as religious anymore. “Religious” has become
a nasty word for many Americans, and
nowadays hardly any college students will describe themselves in public as
religious. It’s just too toxic an adjective.

The
swift change in public perceptions
of our bedrock religious institutions reflects a phenomenon that the cultural
critic Neil Postman referred to as the “Great Symbol
Drain,” which he defined in his volume Technopoly.
Postman described symbol drain as “the trivialization
of significant cultural symbols.... Through prints, lithographs, photographs, and later, movies and
television, religious and national symbols became
commonplaces, breeding indifference, if not necessarily contempt” (165–6). Postman draws upon Daniel Boorstin’s argument in his study The Image (1984), as well as an older argument by the Marxist
critic Walter Benjamin, to claim that the
mechanical reproduction of images empties them of their powers. “One picture, we are told, is worth a thousand words. But a thousand
pictures, especially if they are of the same object, may not be worth anything at all.... The extent of
symbol overload and therefore symbol drain is unprecedented in human
history.... The constraints are so few that we may call this a form of cultural
rape, sanctioned by an ideology that gives boundless
supremacy to technological progress and is indifferent to the unraveling of
tradition” (166, 170).

Postman’s fiercest enemies are the agents of advertising
and, much more pervasively, the lords of technology in our lives, or what he calls the lords of “Technopoly,” by which
he means the monopoly of technological powers over our culture. Much of Postman’s wrath is directed at television, as in his famous critique of mass media as
entertainment. But Postman’s critique came years
before the emergence of the cynicism on steroids that today’s cable networks serve up, in the form of Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher, whose mission in life appears to be the complete
evisceration of anything that might be considered sacred. (Postman was under
the impression that someone as quaint as Johnny Carson was beyond the pale, a contrast that shows just how far we have
fallen since the 1980s.) Eliade, Postman, and I all share a great sadness, and a great alarm about our culture’s strange insistence on the evisceration of our
most valuable traditions and their emblems

This phenomenon of draining previously robust and useful terms and
symbols reaches well beyond the strictly religious realms of our culture.
Consider the change in public perceptions of the federal government over the
years. Perhaps the greatest symbol of American government is the White House
and the office of the President. One of the great expressions of the symbolic
weight of that institution was written by Walt Whitman, a man who nearly worshipped Abraham Lincoln.
Whitman spent much of his time in the nation’s
capitol during the Civil War visiting injured Union soldiers and acting as a
part-time nurse of sorts. During the course of many of his days in Washington, Whitman would drift by the residence of the
president and occasionally would even spot Lincoln on the streets of the city.
His romantic depiction of these things captures eloquently an older version of
how many Americans envisioned these lofty images: “The white portico—the palace-like, tall, round
columns, spotless as snow—the walls, also—the tender and soft moonlight, flooding the pale marble... everything so white, so marbly pure and dazzling yet soft—the White
House of future poems, and of dreams and dramas, there in the soft and copious moon.” Whitman’s version of
the White House focuses precisely on its whiteness: its purity, innocence, and even
sinlessness.

And yet, in my lifetime, the
scandals associated with the presidency have been enormous, and the media coverage of those scandals
unprecedented. I only want to point out what almost any American, whether left or right, should already know: numerous shameful and
sickening betrayals of the public trust have been thrust upon us from the
confines of that once sacred and hallowed place we call the White House. It is
not so much that scandals never occurred in earlier times—but certainly the
media were not as overpowering, and the administrations
were better at covering them up.

Since Vietnam and Watergate, news coverage has become almost
omniscient if not completely vicious. The result has been the drainage of
prestige and honor from the symbolic pool of the presidency and the White
House. Few Americans today would be able to embrace Whitman’s description without some serious
reservations. In fact, possibly the
most famous image of the White House in recent popular culture was in the film “Independence Day.” Who can forget the shocking sequence of sinister aliens as
they deploy their mysterious mega-weapon and blow the building to bits and
pieces? At least the President got out in time,
though most of his staff were left behind. The desire to obliterate the White
House, unfortunately, is not so altogether alien among good
tax-paying American citizens, sadly.

In this context we might consider one of the
most successful and honored prime time network series of the new millennium so
far, “The West
Wing.” It was the winner of nine Emmy Awards in its
first season, the most ever, and
it featured some of the most thought-provoking and edifying stories in recent
television memory. The idea for the series began with the success of Rob Reiner’s “The
American President,” a film that captured many
of the same emotions and which was written by Aaron Sorkin, one of the major writers for the series. “The West Wing”
featured an excellent cast, headed by Martin Sheen as
the President, and although it was Democratic and liberal in
orientation, it often managed to come off as somehow beyond
partisan politics. Certainly there were issues at stake in which the
administration had to show its left-leaning colors: gay rights, women’s rights, capital punishment,
social security, and so forth. But often “The West Wing”
modeled a bi-partisan common sense approach that thrilled its audience by being
precisely what we might hope our government could actually be. In this way, it managed, on many occasions, to transcend the partisan politics that
characterize our government these days.

In an episode about Social
Security, for example, the ad­ministration brokers a deal
between Republicans and Democrats and gets no recognition for the part it plays
in doing so. In another episode about gay rights,
in which a high school boy is brutally tortured and killed by gay-bashers, the audience is tricked at first into
imagining the father of the murdered boy as being ashamed of his dead son. Only
later do we discover that the father is in fact ashamed of the abandonment of
the gay community by the government—including the left-leaning White House. The
function of the plot twist is to show how regular Americans really do care
about individual adolescents, no
matter their sexual practices—and that even politicians can be blinded by
partisan stereotypes. The grieving father,
imagined by the Administration (and the audience) to be some caricature of
conservative homophobia because of his political and geographic particulars, is finally revealed to be the
compassionate and caring parent that we all should be. Another plot development
involves the hiring of a pretty blond Republican attorney by this steadfastly
Democratic administration. While at first she is chastised by her colleagues, she slowly begins to see their value, just as her co-workers do begin to see
hers. “These people are patriots,” she tells her snide right wing friends
ridiculing the White House, “and I’m
their lawyer!”

“The
West Wing” depicted a humane, just,
and extremely selfless White House—even though the show did not really pull its
punches in depicting the crude infighting,
the difficult relations with the media,
and even the scandals that are always a part of presidential politics. The
Chief of Staff is shown to have been an alcoholic and drug addict in a previous
stint as Secretary of Labor; the Vice
President is forced to resign due to Clinton-like sexual philandering; and even the President is depicted as
having hidden his own life-threatening illness during his election campaign. In
other words, this was not just a rosy
and peachy kind of White House. It was emphatically situated in the real
political world of our day, with all
its pettiness and mindless partisanship at play. Through it all, the President and his trusty staff
figured out ways to maintain an ethical balance,
serve the American public, and
believe in the ideas at the core of America itself.

“The West
Wing” succeeded by drawing upon two related American
yearnings. First, it attempted to reinvest the great symbols of
American government with the power and glory that they previously held for most
Americans. Second, it did this by drawing upon the very real desire
among the American public for such a reinvestment. In other words, “The West
Wing” took advantage of the American yearning for our
great symbols to be filled up again with meaning. “The West Wing”
was a symptom of American shame and disappointment about our abandonment of
what matters most to us. In a remarkable episode called “Shibboleth,” the action
takes place during Thanksgiving week, and there
is much inspiring talk about our history of religious freedoms. Meanwhile, a ship is discovered in San Diego carrying about
a hundred refugees from China, who claim
to be Christians persecuted for their faith. The President summons a
representative, in order to determine the authenticity of their
faith, and he is not disappointed. The refugee’s testimony is stirring and convincing, and the President arranges a political solution
that both grants refuge and allows the Chinese government to save face. It is a
moving episode celebrating the origins of the American mythos—and it was aired
originally during the Thanksgiving season, which
heightened its clout.

It is true that some critics were not as glowing in their responses to “The West Wing” as
my discussion here. For example, in their
volume Why Do People Hate America? (2003),
Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies give a riveting and at times brilliant
analysis of how the program relied upon Arab stereotypes and, despite the show’s
supposed left politics, was complicit in the War
on Terror rhetoric of the Bush administration. And it is worth noting how the
series often reinforces certain kinds of stereotypes, especially of Evangelical Christians, Republicans, and to some
extent of Arabs and Muslims. There are other criticisms to be made as well.

But my point here is to focus on its positive features as a series
fostering hope among Americans and attempting to reclaim the symbolic
possibilities of the White House. “The West
Wing” was most compelling when it combated the draining
of symbolic weight of its subject and ultimately sung the song of America. “The West Wing”
phenomenon is symptomatic of both the increasing suspicion toward institutional
forces in our lifetimes, as well as the deep yearning
to recover and act upon the sources of our most valued ideals. In short, the great symbols of our civilization have been
taking a beating lately, and it is most noticeable in
the public perceptions of such crucial American institutions as the church, the family, and the
Presidency. So is the drainage of the symbol of our national ideal: the White
House. Overall, the series constituted a powerful jeremiad
calling America back to its sacred ideals, and it
reminded us of what precisely those ideals are.

Postman’s concept of the “Great Symbol Drain” is
valuable as far as it goes. But his focus on merely the amount of mechanical
reproduction of images is not enough. As I have already briefly suggested, it is not just overexposure but also the nature
of that overexposure. Over and over, we are shown
the dark and corrupt underbelly of things; over and over
our media bombard us with the hideous aspects of these symbolic institutions.
We are thus suffering from an even more widespread and sinister kind of
drainage. Postman hints at this connection between the drainage of symbols and
the drainage of something much larger and much more significant: “With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss
of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating
consequences of Technopoly’s power.... it is certain
that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent origin and
power.... Symbol drain is both a symptom and a cause of a loss of narrative” (171, 173). Postman
recognized the loss of faith not just in the symbols of our civilization, but in our mythic stories as well.

Besides the “Great Symbol Drain,” we need to understand what I would like to call
the “Great Story Drain,”
by which I am referring to the loss of faith in narrative-driven versions of
truth in our culture. The “Great Story Drain” follows, of course, the standard prime directive of postmodernism, that we now must have “incredulity toward metanarratives,” surely one of the most famous and puissant
three-word phrases available to us in English today. Many Americans today do
not envision their lives as being part of a larger story. The only story of
which they are a part is their individual life story, and perhaps beyond that the story of their job
or their family.

A critical recognition of the “Great Story
Drain,” my own term for the loss of belief in the power
of communal stories, is a fairly common one. America’s communal vision,
once a crucial source of hope for our culture,
has almost died due to the current stress on cultural suspicion and paranoia
regarding metanarratives. Communal hope and belief may in fact be the chief
victims of the Great Symbol Drain that Postman described. And the rejection of
communal vision and hope constitutes also the rejection of the sacred—something
we humans cannot live without. Again I will quote from Mircea Eliade: “the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the
human spirit.... desacralization pervades the entire experience of the
nonreligious societies and ... in consequence,
[one] finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions
of religious man in the archaic societies” (13).

Difficult, says Eliade, but not impossible. If we can
restore that vision, if we can recover that
yearning, and if we can reassert that there is something
sacred about America and about our very lives,
then perhaps there is still a chance that we will remember this era not as the
death of American vision, but as an era in which the
American vision almost died. An effort like “The
West Wing,” miniscule and flawed though it surely was, should be applauded for its contribution to such
a project—whatever one’s particular politics might
be—if for no other reason than that it depicts the possibility of American
vision, national consensus,
and the reinvigoration of national symbols.

In our current state of symbol drain,
such possibilities are very much needed. Just the other day, during his first televised news conference, President Obama was asked by a reporter if his
recent efforts had discouraged him from going forward with his attempts at
bipartisan legislation. This question came (with a straight face) after only
three weeks in office! Such profane levels of cynicism are very hard to
overcome, but Eliade and Postman would agree that such
jadedness originates in a depleted national imagination, one that has largely lost touch with the sacred
(despite all the campaign rhetoric). What comes next—and what Eliade and
Postman are not so clear about—are methods by which we might go about
recovering that sacred imagination.

The good news is that the electorate evidently agrees. Indeed, it may be the primary reason for the popularity
of President Obama: his uncanny ability to scratch an itch that we are all
feeling, in these postmodern days. We all await the
verdict of history, but given the state of our national symbology, hope is a good thing; maybe, even, the best thing.

Harold K. Bush, Jr.teaches American
literature and culture at Saint Louis University and is the author of two books
and numerous articles on topics ranging from American literary figures to the
pragmatics of teaching and reading. He recently was a short term Fulbright
Senior Scholar at the University of Freiburg, Germany.